Vendor Roundup: Ciena, Huawei, Infinera, Cisco

March always brings lots of interesting optical and packet technology news, and this year is no different.  Here’s a quick rundown of some interesting nextgen demos in the past few days that are definitely worth keeping an eye on:

Ciena has done two powerful demos of its WaveLogic 5 Extreme technology in the last few days. On Friday, they teamed up with Verizon to test 800Gbps over a single wavelength on Verizon’s live fiber network. Juniper’s QFX 5220 packet platforms were paired with Ciena’s 6500 to make that possible. And yesterday, Ciena’s optics got a long distance tryout with Comcast. The two deployed a 600Gbps single wavelength pilot over a 1,600km span. The test went from Newark to Pittsburgh and back.

They may have been largely pushed out of the US and other markets, but Huawei also found a way to demonstrate its own 800G capabilities. They teamed up with Turkcell to demonstrate an 800G transmission between two data centers in Istanbul on Turkcell’s live network. They also confirmed 400Gbps longhaul unregenerated transmission between Istanbul and Ankara.

Infinera has lined up a partner to bring its new XR optics technology to market. II-VI is collaborating with Infinera, looking to take advantage of the new platform, which leverages independently routable Nyquist subcarriers to create new point-to-multipoint possibilities. The two hope to introduce a family of pluggable XR optics offerings aimed at a wide variety of applications.

And down under, Cisco and Telstra have been working on C-RAN for 5G wireless services. They announced this morning the completion of what is billed as the world’s first 5G call over a packetized fronthaul network. The feat uses packetized eCPRI radio frames with network timing services over an SDN-powered transport network. That also lets them automate failover between the cell site and baseband in case of faults.

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Categories: Telecom Equipment